Local search engine optimization, or SEO, is an important aspect of improving your business’s traffic both online and offline and your business’s SEO as a whole. One part of local SEO is local listing management. Local listing management can be defined as the process of routinely updating and maintaining your business’s location data online. In short, it is making sure that your name, address, phone number, and URL, or NAP, is up to date anywhere your business is listed online. 

Why Care About Local Listing Management

Research has found that 80% of mobile shoppers use a “near me” search, meaning that your information needs to show up and be accurate to target a large number of potential customers. Working on your business’s local SEO is the first big step in local listing management. For people to find you through “near me” searches you have to be in local packs and listings. It is not enough to just be on the listings, but your NAP needs to be consistent throughout all of them as well. If your NAP is not the same everywhere, it can lead to confusion with customers and if your NAP is inaccurate, then you could be potentially losing out on business. By managing your local listings you can ensure that your NAP is correct and that you are providing customers with the most accurate information on how to get in touch or find you. 

How to Manage Your Local Listings

It is one thing to know why you should manage your local listings, but it is another thing to know how to do it. There are a few different ways to go about managing your local listings. You can either do it yourself, manually, that is to say go through and distribute your data to directories and local listings individually, or you can find and use a tool that will do the heavy lifting for you. 

Whether you decide to manage your local listings yourself or go with a service that does it for you, there are a couple of things that you should do. The first is to find all of your listings, accurate and inaccurate. You want to try to get rid of any trace of wrong information that you find. Another thing to do is make sure that your NAP is accurate with the postal service. If the address on your NAP and what the postal service has on file it could cause directories and other platforms to reject your data.  

Local Listing Management Tools

As mentioned above, an option to manage your local listings is to find a tool to manage them for you. There are different tools that can do different things for you, for a tool that can help you find your listings, as well as identify and correct inaccurate listings, try Yext. For a tool that can help you find your business’s listings, and continue to manage them, try Whitespark. If you need a tool to get your data distributed, try Birdseye. When you need a tool to distribute your data and manage it well, try SEMrush. No matter what you need, odds are that there is a tool out there for it. 

Getting a handle on your business’s local listing management is key in improving your SEO and growing your business. Managing your local listings is easier than ever with the technology and tools available. Take the step and make your business soar by managing your local listings.